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Comment by awestroke | Hacker News Reader

The list of alternatives just makes me lose hope of cutting out Google. They are lightyears ahead of the alternatives in so many categories.

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I use DDG for search full time and I’ve found that I need to use !g less and less often. For the times I do use !g I am finding myself increasingly disappointed in the results. I think Google is losing the war against spamdexing [1] and I think the search industry is ripe for disruptive innovation.

I have seen and participated in a number of discussions here on HN about the potential for a new search engine that eliminates a lot of spam and commercial sites to allow users to find small sites made by real people, just like in the early days of the web. I hope it’s not just a nostalgic impulse. I’m going to investigate it myself after I graduate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing

Edit: forgot to add the link for [1]

I think you forgot to expand your [1]

If you put in a request to DDG to have entries linked to phrases removed from their search engine under EU GDPR or EU Right to be Forgotten, they will have an external law firm write back and tell you they get their results from Yahoo, Bing and other search engines and you need to contact those search engines direct. Google have actually been the fastest at getting my data out of their system, Microsoft never got back to me despite repeated requests, Facebook would rather believe Norfolk Constabulary instead of me despite being the copyright owner. So many criminals control your life, most of you dont realise it.

Even after using DDG for the last 5-6 years, I find myself always using !g with it. So much that, it has become a muscle memory thing and sometimes I type it involuntarily.

Sure, if I just care about US specific results and I am doing an exact term search or maybe StackOverflow result is my target, DDG comes close but Google gets context of things much better. I keep finding much better search results that had more context with my search. I don't know how to quantify/measure this but to me Google Search is still much better.

> it has become a muscle memory thing and sometimes I type it involuntarily.

Same. I sometimes even type '!g' into Google itself by mistake

I ended up with the same muscle memory. That’s why I eventually just switched to StartPage.com instead, which is basically a Google proxy.

I've found personally, that nearly everyone of my DDG searches results in a subsequent Google search with more relevant data. It sucks too because I would rather use DDG on principle alone. I will agree, results in Google do seem worse, but until someone can give Google a run for their money they'll continue down the path they're currently on which is collect all the data for profit. Also, Yandex images, vastly superior.

DDG has been absolutely awful for me. Google has 15+ years of my search history at this point and the improvement that makes on my search results is incredible.

I agree that spamdexing is a huge problem, but could the rise of rel="nofollow" contribute just as much? The vast majority of user-generated content is marked as nofollow, but this is largely the same type of content that made early Google good. I often get better results doing a reddit search than using a search engine. It seems that by ignoring user-created links, search engines are ignoring 90-99% of the signal. The rest of the signal is mostly from commercial and promotional sites, so it's not surprising that these make up nearly all of the top search results.

I often do want results from commercial sites such as nginx.com, but I want results that real people have found valuable and not results that some paid blog post linked to.

I agree in some cases that the open source alternatives aren’t good enough, so I’ve done a mix of using things on this list, and switching to Apple alternatives (when needed). Got an iPhone, and using some of the Apple things has made it much easier.

I recently de-googled myself almost completely (still have a couple domain names with them, still use YouTube). Yeah Apple has their own issues going on too, but I am just happy to be mostly cut out from the Google madness.

Lightyears ahead, but are the alternatives good enough? I switched from using Gmail as the common landing spot for all of my email to Fastmail who in some ways is nowhere close to Gmail but in others are way ahead of Google. But above all else I know Fastmail isn’t running datamining programs on my email and contacts list to create and sell a marketing profile about me, and that is worth more to me than I’m paying them for email service.

They are mostly just producing office tools. Imagine that 50 years ago people said they couldn't stop using staplers and typewriters. Would a ban on these products really have doomed these people's lives and businesses?

Which?

[not op] Given that Microsoft/Apple/etc. aren't mentioned, G Suite has no real alternative other than Zoho (Note: nextcloud doesn't do email, so it's arguably not a GSuite competitor). This list would be better titled 'free/open-source alternatives to Google products' since excluding the other big companies extends past "de-google" and more into "open source living", if that's a good term for it.

Microsoft is absolutely a GSuite competitor and has arguably been in the space longer.

I moved most of my custom domain emails off Google some months back and onto Microsoft 365 and it's honestly a great experience.

Exactly, but this list makes it a point to not include other big tech companies.

It isnt just Google you need to cut out of your life, all the global corps are complicit in building the surveillance state. Copyright laws means you cant check your chips on your devices have not become persistent backdoors into your system. You simply can not check the code. Goal posts will always be moved as you are Resource Burned fighting the system. Welcome to the Matrix Mr Anderson.

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